Sydney Hospital – The Rum Hospital

Macquarie Street’s hospital stretch is one of those Sydney stories where the nickname outlived the building. Governor Lachlan Macquarie wanted a proper public hospital, London wouldn’t fund it, so in 1810 he contracted D’Arcy Wentworth, Garnham Blaxcell and Alexander Riley to build a big colonnaded complex in return for a short-term monopoly on importing spirits. He laid the foundation stone on 30 October 1811; shoddy work delayed opening until 1816. Sydneysiders called it the Rum Hospital — and the name stuck.

The finished group had a central ward block with two flanking wings. Those wings were soon pulled into other government jobs: the north wing became the Legislative Council (and later Parliament House), the south wing became the Sydney Mint. Francis Greenway surveyed the dodgy fabric soon after completion and later supervised reinforcing that helped the surviving wings endure. The central Rum Hospital block itself was demolished from 1879. Under the Sydney Hospital Act (royal assent 1881), the present Sydney Hospital building opened in 1894.

Sydney Hospital and Sydney Eye Hospital remains Australia’s oldest continuously operating hospital on this Macquarie Street site — though the working wards are the late-Victorian and later buildings, not the 1816 central block. The hospital crest still nods to the rum-barrel funding yarn.